DV for Teachers

Kevin Schmitt Is Not A Lawyer; yet he explains the practical impact of The Eolas Patent Decision and What it Means for Web Designers:

Now, some may be a little dismayed that JavaScript becomes a necessity to work around this issue, because what if the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled? The answer, which the already dismayed among us really won’t like, is “tough noogies.” Right now, it’s the cost of doing business to ensure that the extra activating click doesn’t come into play. Microsoft didn’t want to pay, so we all have to play. Besides, you can always make use of the <noscript> tag to warn users that JavaScript is required.

Patent, shmatent. Whatever the reason, the rules have changed, and this is the first brief and clear explanation of how to make sure your web pages with embedded videos work in the new Internet Explorer browsers. Eesh.

From The Zoom In Newsletter – Free & Practical Know-How and Articles from the Experts at Magnet Media. This quotation will likely roll off their home page, but it’s worth thinking about.

We have this situation where the number of people who can produce video programming is poised to explode, with inexpensive digital cameras and editing tools, and the existing distribution systems can’t support it,’ he says. ‘You can’t have 100,000 people producing shows for cable television. The only thing that can support it is the Internet.’ We’re all familiar with the Internet of text. Coming soon: the Internet of video.

—Jeremy Allaire, as reported by Scott Kirsner, The Boston Globe

We and our students are producers of video programming – how are we going to distribute it, if not on the internet, through torrents and P2P applications?

Dave Nagel, to whom I seem to link a lot, reviews iSquint 1.3.1:

iSquint is a fantastic encoding tool for people who want to put video on their iPods or for those who want to transcode their programs for iPod users. It handles files that QuickTime Pro (and Compressor) can’t deal with; it produces video of reasonable quality; it’s simple to use; it allows you to batch process any number of files of varying types; and, best of all, it’s free. You have absolutely nothing to lose by trying out iSquint. I highly recommend checking it out.

Note that iPod for video doesn’t have to go on an iPod. It’s just really small, really good video that can go on an iPod. You heard it here first.

David Jakes’ The Strength of Weak Ties: Digital Soft-telling?

Why do we do digital storytelling? I tell everyone this: it improves writing skills (it does and we have evidence) and it makes students more visually literate. But there is more. Something much more powerful…

Apparently, Digital Storytelling in education has some hot buzz write now, like podcasting and blogs and more. It’s a name for teaching and practicing multimedia literacy, and I don’t think it’s a fad, I don’t think it’s going away. I heard Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling last fall’s National Storytelling Festival¹, and he gave a keynote at the SITE conference, which was in Orlando last week concurrently with FETC. Tim Wilson of The Savvy Technologist posted an interview with Joe here.

¹ Dang – I thought I had blogged it here or at timmerritt.net, but can’t find anything – what a colossal brain cramp.

Content is conversation. Content organizes itself. People connect through their content.

Click to read Will Richardson’s live notes from David Warlick’s FETC presentation on The New Shape of Information that Will posted on David’s Landmark Project Landmarks Wiki.

Photoshop Tips: Batch Processing Images – Converting formats, setting up actions and running batches – Dave Nagel

As you already know, it’s possible to batch process folders full of images and save them out in various formats (JPEG, TIFF, etc.) using Photoshop’s presets. But how do you create your own export presets if you don’t like the ones supplied by Adobe? And how can you save images to multiple formats in one step? We’ll look at these issues in this week’s “Tips for Beginners.”

Or so they say:

Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Everyone knows a little bit about something, and this free, AJAX-enhanced eLearning web service is designed to bring out the teacher in all of us. Sign up and build a course in minutes; advertise your course on our eLearning Market to get the word out. Get teaching with Nuvvo, Web 2.0’s answer to eLearning.

They’ve got a Nuvvo Blog, too. I haven’t used them, but it looks like they have lots of activity there with courses both free and for a fee, from programming language tutorials to customer service training to foreign language to self-development.

This post is more than comments and links that I hope you find useful; this post is a marker for me. I had to put something up here, not just in my journal or calendar, about what I’ve learned and seen at this conference and the impact this experience has had on me. The sessions, workshops, and conversations here have inspired me to a new sense of purpose personally and professionally: to find more ways to teach and talk about the power of media and storytelling to hook students into learning, making the process something they can own, can see the point in. The list after the jump is a catalog of the most significant things of the last few days. (more…)

Blogging this live will be tough… it’s hands-on. We’re doing a basic project – a bouncing ball, to which we apply “behaviors” which allow all kinds of action or movement without key-framing. Very impressive. I’ve seen demos of this before, but this is my first hands-on with it. Won’t be the last, etc. etc.

[Update: here’s a link to Part I.]

This afternoon we’re getting a quick iMovie tutorial and then they’re turning us loose to make a project. This is my first hands-on with iMovie HD, too. These folks are doing a pretty good job of making Mac-ish things comprehensible for this crowd of mostly PC users. The demo clip is a 2:44 in duration, 320×240 pixels, and 10 frames per second. Because iMovie only works with DV formatted video material, iMovie HD is taking almost 10 minutes to import this clip for editing – essentially creating an additional 20 frames per second while scaling the size up to 1440×1080. The file size will go from 4.4 MB to 1.39 GB, since we’re working in the iMovie HD default resolution. Which is too big. I ended up creating a new project in DV format; 30 frames per second, and 720×480 resolution. The file was 562 MB, still big, but much more manageable (and viewable on non-HD televisions).

At the end of the hands-on (iMovie HD’s themes are very, very nice once you get how they work), we talked about storyboards, when and when not to take the time, and showed some of the storyboarded sequence-pitch outtakes from Shrek. Which is entertaining, and shows pretty effectively how they help visually think through a story.

Finally, links to royalty free images at Stock Exchange and music at Freeplay Music, and reference books, in addition to the others mentioned (and shortly hope to have linked in Part I):

• The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
• 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them

• 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters